More Zionist Nonsense from the Post. I sent two emailed letters to the editor of the New York Post in response to Radical Zionist columns this past week.

[1.] John Podhoretz claims that Arab nationalists are all, of necessity, our enemy: "Secular Islamic radicals and militant Islamic theocrats are united in their determination to confront and destroy liberal democracy". Bull.
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WHAT exactly are "Secular Islamic radicals"? One is either secular or Islamic. The one voids the other. Podhoretz also claims there is a wide movement to unite "the Islamic nation" and that that is dangerous to us. Actually, pan-Arabism speaks mainly of "the Arab nation". Even when secularists speak of a wider Moslem community as "the Islamic nation", much as Christians used to speak of "Christendom" (whatever happened to that?), it is not necessarily in imperial or confrontational terms.
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Consider this quote from a speech by Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak:
>>No one should imagine that the desire of the Islamic nation to unite its will, join forces, and integrate its policies is just an attempt to brace for a civilization clash or to vie with other international blocs.
This is rather a legitimate race that springs first and foremost from the nation's will to regain its glory to maintain its distinguished status and to help its peoples, like all others, realize better chances of decent life, and to arm coming generations with science, knowledge and economic potential of survival and competition.<<

I don't see a threat there. As for a single great empire of all Moslems, that is as unlikely a project as a single great nation to be created from all Christian countries around the world. Ain'ta gonna happen, so don't worry about it.

(Responsive to "Naming the Enemy", October 7, 2005 column by John Podhoretz in the New York Post)
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Podhoretz was referring to President Bush's major address on Thursday, October 6th, to the National Endowment for Democracy, which pretended that the U.S. cares deeply about democracy, even tho his party has gerrymandered state legislatures that Republicans control to make elections almost pointless, and that that is part of why Islamists hate us. But he went further — much, much further:

No act of ours invited the rage of the killers, and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder. We will never back down, never give in and never accept anything less than complete victory.

The fact that we have sent over 95 billion Christian taxpayer dollars to Israel, smiled upon transfers of billions more Jewish private dollars to support Zionism, and consistently defended, by vetos of condemnations of Israeli crimes in the UN, and by a constant inpouring of military aid to Israel, has nothing to do with anything. The fact that we went 7,000 miles from our shores to attack a Moslem, Arab country that never in its history attacked us and had no plans to attack us nor the means to do so had nothing to do with this 'unprovoked' war against us. Yeah, right.
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Bush cannot believe that. Nor can anyone else on Earth. So why do we put up with this arrant nonsense, this evil, unending lie?
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Moreover, his Administration actively opposes an amendment approved by the U.S. Senate to forbid torture in the interrogation and general treatment of prisoners! That is beyond-belief astounding!
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The Law of Tit-for-Tat (in Latin, lex talionis) holds that if you do something bad to someone, he has the right to do the same to you. Does the U.S. really want to establish as legitimate the principle that combatants can be tortured by their captors? Doesn't the U.S. sometimes lose soldiers to capture by the other side?
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Tellingly, the prime mover of the Senate amendment against torture was Senator John McCain, who spent over five years in the "Hanoi Hilton", being brutally mistreated by Vietnamese Communists. He survived. Other U.S. prisoners did not. He knows better than to say that torture is neato-keen and fine for us to do to others, both as a moral issue and as a practical matter, protection for our own combatants. He put the case plainly: part of what empowered him and other captives to withstand the psychological and physical mistreatment was the belief that we are better than that, and if the situations were reversed, we would never do to our prisoners what they were doing to ours. But that's not important to the Bush Administration.
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One website's discussion of the lex talionis states (emphasis added):

The lex talionis is a law of equal and direct retribution: in the words of the Hebrew scriptures, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, a life for a life."

The earliest written code of laws was the Code of Hammurabi, the most famous of the Old Babylonian, or Amorite, kings of Mesopotamia. [Note: Mesopotamia is the old name for Iraq. Sumer, part of Mesopotamia (Iraq), is the original homeland of the Hebrews.] Hammurabi's code of laws is almost entirely based on the principle of equal and direct retribution; it betrays the origin of law in retributive violence. Since the lex talionis is often the earliest form that law takes, from it we can conclude that the basic function of law is revenge and retribution. Unlike direct retribution, however, the law is administered by the state or by individuals that cannot be victims of revenge in return. While revenge and retribution threatens to break down society as people take reciprocal revenge [on] one another, revenge as it is embodied in law and administered by the state prevents mutual and reciprocal revenge from tearing the fabric of society apart.

The author of that discussion overlooks the fact that there is more than one "state" in the world, and that the state does not have a monopoly on violence. So, altho individual citizens may not be able to retaliate against their own state, other states certainly can retaliate for acts of state that they regard as unjust, and groups of citizens, acting in concert as insurrectionaries, revolutionaries, "insurgents", or guerrilla warriors, can also retaliate against acts of state with which they militantly disagree. That is what we face today with al-Qaeda, with the Iraqi insurgents, with all kinds of insurrections all over this planet.
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Jesus recognized the endless, vicious-cycle nature of violence and counterviolence and sought a way to defuse it. His formula was not "an eye for an eye" but "turn the other cheek" — don't retaliate, and hope that refusal to fite back will disarm the aggressor. Mahatma Gandhi put it this way:

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

That plainly does not always work, but it has worked in surprising contexts. For instance, the Mongol hordes that killed uncounted hundreds of thousands in their rampage across Eurasia killed almost everyone in cities that resisted but allowed some cities that surrendered without a fite to go relatively unmolested — but only some. Others were destroyed and everyone killed anyway. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to British imperial control of the Indias (now mainly India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) worked. An identical campaign against the Mongols would have failed, and produced catastrophic mass death.
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The practicalities then, have to be weighed. The morality of torture does not. Jesus made that plain almost 2,000 years ago in his Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12):

[King James version]
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

[Or, perhaps a tad easier to understand in modern English, the New International Version]
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Plainly George Bush would not want to be tortured. How, then, can he oppose a prohibition on torture by Americans yet consider himself a good Christian?
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A day before Bush's speech, I emailed another letter to the editor of the New York Post about a different columnist's uncomprehending remarks, to warn of the ultimate tit-for-tat.

[2.] Arnold Ahlert does not seem to realize that when he says, "The whole world will also continue to tolerate an entire society steeped in psychotic, self-destructive behavior, which makes one wonder: Who is sicker, those who commit atrocities — or those who let them pass in silence?" he is talking about Israel, not Palestine. And not just Israel. The longer Jews worldwide back Israel's crimes to the hilt, the more endangered they become. Sooner or later the world will stop tolerating Zionism, and turn on all Jews who do not starkly disown Zionism and its necessary crimes. The creation of a Jewish country in an Arab land was an insane, stupid mistake. Mistakes should be corrected, not compounded — endlessly, thru mass murder. At end, Israel endangers the very existence of Jews worldwide. Tho Zionists may say "Never again", much of the rest of the world is starting to think, "One more time!"

(Responsive to "Another Mom 'Martyr'", October 6, 2005 column by Arnold Ahlert in the New York Post)
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Consider this observation from the Jewish website jewsnotzionists.org:

So, Zionism has protected no one. At first it endangered the old Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land. Then it endangered the millions who lived there. Finally, it has plunged into danger Jewry world wide and many others, including Americans anywhere around the world.

Can that possibly be what the Jews, and Christian Americans, want? to turn the entire world against them to demand a Final Solution that Hitler could not achieve because large parts of the world opposed him for other things?
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Apparently Zionists think that they can permanently divide The Enemy (everyone not Jewish) and stay safe by pitting Christians against Moslems. But if those two great communities ever realize that they are being played for fools and set at each other's throat by the Jews, won't there be hell to pay?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,951.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:19 AM